Trump’s fear-based re-election plan

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/08/2019 (2216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

U.S. President Donald Trump is gripped by fear. That is the message coming through from his public statements, his recent policy decisions and reporting from inside the White House that paints a picture of a president increasingly rattled and irrational, striking out wildly as he searches for an argument that will frighten Americans enough to re-elect him.

Let’s take a tour around the recent news:

● Trump told his fervid supporters at a rally last week that if he is not re-elected, the economy will crash. “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(K)’s down the tubes. Everything is going to be down the tubes. So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.”

● Amid growing signs of a coming economic downturn, he is reportedly experiencing a combination of denial and rage. “Trump has a somewhat conspiratorial view, telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his re-election,” the Post reports. But he has also “told aides and allies that (Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell) would be a scapegoat if the economy goes south.”

● Trump is increasingly using the powers of the presidency against his perceived enemies: “The president has grounded a military jet set for use by the Democratic House Speaker, yanked a security clearance from a former CIA director critical of him, threatened to withhold disaster aid from states led by Democrats, pushed to reopen a criminal investigation targeting Hillary Clinton and publicly called for federal action to punish technology and media companies he views as biased against him,” the Post reported Aug. 15.

● When he learned that representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were planning a visit to Israel, Trump pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bar them from the country — yes, a U.S. president pushing a foreign government to refuse entry to U.S. public officials. Netanyahu initially relented, then after near-universal international condemnation, announced that Tlaib would be allowed, as a private citizen, to visit her elderly grandmother on the West Bank (she eventually declined the offer).

● In the most bizarre bit of news, Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland, a suggestion that should make us wonder whether he has gone completely off the deep end. His own staff seems to be wondering, too: “The presidential request has bewildered aides, some of whom continue to believe it isn’t serious, but Trump has mentioned it for weeks.” When the prime minister of Denmark — of which Greenland is an autonomous region — dismissed Trump’s interest as “absurd,” he abruptly cancelled a planned visit to her country.

In all this, it’s the economic news that really has Trump sweating. As any sensible observer understands, presidents get more credit than they deserve when the economy does well and more blame than they deserve when it does poorly, because most of what happens in a country with about 330 million people and more than US$20 trillion of economic activity is out of their control.

Trump was given an economy in the midst of a steady recovery, which since then has continued on pretty much the same trajectory (though job creation was somewhat better under president Barack Obama).

Yet more than any other president in history, he has insisted that he deserves personal credit for every positive economic development, which could only be the result of his unique genius.

He has a particular habit of visiting a factory that was approved or began construction when Obama was president and saying it was all because of him.

“It was the Trump administration that made it possible. No one else,” he said last week outside a Shell plastics plant that had been planned since 2012 and which the company formally announced in 2016.

“Without us, you would never have been able to do this.”

Meanwhile, whenever he creates a new controversy with some racist outburst, distressing public performance or new revelation of corruption on the part of himself and his appointees, Republicans everywhere offer the same argument: OK, so that stuff isn’t exactly optimal, and yeah, I wish he’d tone down the bigotry and stop tweeting. But the economy is doing well, right?

You don’t need a PhD in political science to understand the threat this poses. If the economy does falter — even a slight slowdown, let alone a full-on recession — it could become almost impossible for Trump to win re-election.

If he can’t argue that he has delivered prosperity, all that remains is the single most repugnant human being to ever sit in the Oval Office, befouling everything he touches.

Trump knows this as well as anyone. In his growing fear of that eventuality, he wants us all to be as afraid as he is: afraid of immigrants, afraid of socialism, afraid of dissenting voices, afraid of a changing society, afraid of the future.

As a political strategy, it’s certainly morally abhorrent, but it still might work. After all, if Trump didn’t have such skill at finding and stimulating what is worst in people, he wouldn’t have become president in the first place. And by this time next year, fear could be all he has left.

— Washington Post